Why Won't Windows Do What It's Told?

My eight-year-old has a friend over for the weekend. He couldn't make it to my son's birthday so since he's here, he brought a gift. It is a PC-CDrom of a Harry Potter game. My son was very disappointed because it said PC and not Mac, so he was sure that it would not run.
Last night it was my task to make it work on my Mac Pro. And since I have Parallels Desktop I surmised that it wouldn't be a problem. However, the game ran so slow that it almost did not work at all. And it lacked sound. This was a big bummer, because it contains lots of spoken clues. So I finally broke down and installed Boot Camp and Windows XP Pro.

What a horrible eXPerience that install was. It reminded me of the MS-DOS 5.0 install. A blue, character-based user interface with a yellow progress bar telling me almost nothing. Then I had to choose the partition. All partitions, even those of my Time Machine RAID drive where presented as options. The only thing distinguishing them was their size, measured in mega bytes. And since all partitions are in gigabytes, it was hard to find. I picked the right one, but during the whole install-process I was haunted by that horrible feeling that I had wiped out my precious Mac partition.

When all was installed, I immediately removed all network access by disabling my active ethernet interface. This seems to work because IE could not connect to Microsoft's home-page. However, when installing the game and after several reboots, it came up with the announcement bubble that it had found new updates and if I would like to reboot now or later. Since I was busy trying out the game, I told it to not bother me and remind me later. When playing the game it went back to my desktop and bug me about the update. The bad thing about it was that I could not get back to the game afterwards. I had to restart the game every five minutes. Who at microsoft thought it to be a good idea that later is 5 minutes and not after I am ready with whatever it is I'm doing at the moment. And who thought that you could connect to the internet even when the ethernet to use is disabled. How safe am I from infection when I cannot disable my network?

Oh, and Apple provides drivers for everything and they work just fine. I have the Apple bluetooth mouse and after pairing it it worked. But after every reboot I have to pair it again. Why won't it remember that this is my mouse?

Let's hope that Vista is better, because Windows is bugging me on all kinds of levels.

Zaaf